It's all worked out quite nicely

Playwright Christopher Durang, known for biting wit, feels more at ease with world

Steve Barne, Times Union

By Steve Barnes

Updated 10:37 am, Friday, March 7, 2014

Christopher Durang
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Christopher Durang

David Hyde Pierce, left, and Sigourney Weaver during a scene in Christopher Durang's "Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike," at the Golden Theater in New York, March 4, 2013. "Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike," is a comedy set in a fictional version of a Bucks County, Pa., neighborhood. (Sara Krulwich/The New York Times)

David Hyde Pierce, left, and Sigourney Weaver during a scene in...

Christopher Durang accepts the Tony Award for Best Play for "Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike," during the award ceremony at Radio City Music Hall in New York, June 9, 2013. (Sara Krulwich/The New York Times)

The playwright Christopher Durang had an epiphany while making up new lyrics for a nursery rhyme in his 1983 play "Baby with the Bathwater."

"When I finished, I realized they were," he says, pausing, "nice I thought, 'Oh, that's oddly positive for me.'"

Durang, who's written comedies including "Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You" (1979), "The Actor's Nightmare" and "Beyond Therapy" (both 1981), "The Marriage of Bette and Boo" (1985), "Laughing Wild" (1987) and "Betty's Summer Vacation" (1999), isn't known for nice. He's known for outrageous and absurd and biting, for sure, but nice? That surprised him.

"Some of my plays seem angry," he acknowledges, but even "Sister Mary Ignatius," with its monstrous title character who inflicted trauma on her students with her stern Catholicism, is, at least in its creator's mind, more the product of curiosity than anger.

"When I was writing it and thinking back to what I'd been taught (in Catholic school), it was more a feeling of, 'Wasn't that odd?'" says Durang, who will appear Monday at the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany.

Today, at 65, he's less surprised to be happy, adjusted, nice. His more settled sense of himself and the world is a product of age, spiritual exploration and a happy domestic life in Bucks County, Pa., where he shares a rural home with his companion of more than 20 years, playwright and actor John Augustine, and a rescue dog.

"Taking care of a dog is a great way to keep busy and give yourself a sense of having something to do," he says.

Durang has long since left the Catholic church. While living in New York City after college at Harvard and earning a graduate degree in playwriting from the Yale School of Drama, where his classmates included Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver and Wendy Wasserstein, Durang spent extended periods at a friend's country home in Connecticut. He discovered transcendentalism.

"I was inspired by nature, by being surrounded by it," says Durang, "and I learned 'spirituality' could be a positive word, as opposed to what I'd grown up thinking about it."

Returning to some sense of divinity or holiness was welcome, because the war in Vietnam left him deeply disaffected with the faith in which he was raised.

"We were praying to God to get them to stop dropping napalm, and God said nothing," says Durang. "I realized I didn't understand the meaning of prayer. I just sort of stopped believing, but I found it very hard not to believe anything."

Today, he says, "I guess I sort of believe in the continuation of the soul." (He explored reincarnation in his 2005 black comedy "Miss Witherspoon.") He continues, "I don't know exactly what that means. Maybe it's just that the soul stays in the universe somehow."

Although he hasn't been a practicing Catholic in more than 40 years, Durang always continued to pay attention to happenings in the church.

"All that nonstop news about the molestation of children and bishops moving priests around — it was very upsetting and frustrating," he says.

The new pope, Francis, excites Durang. "I'm extremely interested in him because, if nothing else, he's very different. ... He's not coming out and changing the rules; he's changing the tone about how important things are being talked about. I think he's kind of wonderful."